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Here I propose an ‘elective affinity’ between populism and post-truth communication. Trends in public communication, specifically the breakdown of the twentieth century mass media order and the consolidation of disaggregated mediated spheres, lay the ground for populist politics. The upsurge of populist politics is symptomatic of the consolidation of post-truth communication as a distinctive feature of contemporary politics. The kind of post-truth politics represented by populism thrives in the current conditions of public communication. Populism’s Manichean politics stands in opposition to the possibility of truth-telling as a collective effort to produce agreed-upon facts and reach consensus on the correspondence between assertions and reality.
Silvio Waisbord (Tue,) studied this question.